


You Drink It Down

by scioscribe



Category: Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Content, Drugged Sex, F/F, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-20 23:39:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16565318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Five lives Amma Crellin never lived.





	You Drink It Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [derogatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/derogatory/gifts).



**the youngest**

There were three of them.  Since they couldn’t properly be called just the Crellins or just the Preakers, everyone called them Adora’s girls or sometimes Adora’s little dolls.

“Such bullshit,” Camille said.  She was painting Amma’s toenails a conch-shell pink.  Amma would always sit still for her when she did that—she liked the way she could almost-but-not-quite feel the cold little strokes of the brush.

Amma leaned back, bracing herself with her hands flat on the carpet.  “I know.  I’m the only one that’s still even a little bit little and Marian’s the only doll.”

Camille pressed her lips together and then screwed the cap back on the bottle of nail polish, leaving two of Amma’s toes unpainted.

“I’m not finished yet,” Amma whined, edging her foot up on Camille’s thigh.  She could feel the heat of Camille’s body through her jeans.

“Well, I am.  If you’re going to talk like that.”

“You know I didn’t mean it.”  She stuck her lips out in a pout.

Camille rolled her eyes.  “You mean everything, Amma.”  But she took the cap off the nail polish again.

She was right, too.  Amma had meant it—why shouldn’t she mean it?  Marian was their house’s very own Sleeping fucking Beauty, Mama’s fairy tale wish: skin as white as lilies because she hadn’t been out in the sun since before Amma was even born, eyelids you could move up and down like a doll’s, stubby with their little white lashes, floppy heavy limbs that went where you put them.  One of those realistic baby dolls that would even wet the bed for you.  Or maybe one of those dolls guys had made.  All blonde and pink and easy.

Amma hated her.  She hated the camphor-and-alcohol smell of Marian’s room, the way Mama combed out Marian’s hair all straight and smooth and put chapstick on her lips, the jut of Marian’s hipbones and the piano keys of her ribs because Marian never had to eat at all.  Sometimes when she could get away with it she snuck into Marian’s room and poked at her with a safety pin.  She rubbed the gloss of her mouth and sucked the cherry-flavored stickiness off her finger.  She was going to get some ink someday and give Marian one of those homemade tattoos, like a prison tattoo, on some hidden part of her, some part even Mama never saw.  Under the slight sagging curve of one of her tits, maybe, Amma would write her name.

Or _fuck you_.  Or _love me_.

“Mama shouldn’t have had me so late,” Amma said.  “She doesn’t even want me.  She says I’m difficult like you.”  She cuddled up to Camille, fitting her head against Camille’s collarbone, smelling Camille’s perfume at her throat.  Perfume and sweat and the dry sweet powder of makeup.

Camille settled one hand between Amma’s shoulder blades and rubbed her back in that absent way she had.

_Love me._

“Can I come stay with you for a while?”

Camille sighed.  “Amma, I’m all the way across town, I’d have to haul you to school every morning—”

“I can find rides.  You know I can.”

“Yeah, and I don’t like what those rides tend to come with.”  But she hadn’t budged her hand from Amma’s back.  “I don’t know.  We can ask Mama.”

“She won’t care.  She doesn’t care about anything but Marian.”

Camille didn’t tell her that of course their mama loved her.  Camille knew they weren’t Adora’s girls, and Camille was always honest with her: she was the hard and stinging kind of sweet, like black licorice or somebody leaving scratches on your back during sex.  Camille stroked Amma’s hair.  If Amma had Camille all the time, every day ever, she didn’t know that she would ever want anybody else.

“I’ll talk to her,” Camille said finally.  “And don’t be such a bitch about Marian.”

Camille touched the undersides of her eyes—she didn’t sleep, she had told Amma once, she just took these little white pills that filled her head up with lightning.  Her face always looked bruised from lack of rest.  Like she’d just had a nose job or something, Jodes had said, until Amma pinched at her arm so hard Jodes was the one with the bruise.

“You never knew her like she was when she was awake, Amma.  I did.  She’s my sister as much as you are.”

Envy burned in Amma’s throat like acid.  She didn’t want anything or anybody to be as much as she was, not to Camille.  Not ever.  If Camille were sick like Marian, Amma would tend to her like Mama, would wet her mouth with ice chips and put her in clean nightgowns and play all her favorite songs on the piano.  She would do anything.  You had to love somebody the most if they’d do anything for you.  Some day she would show Camille that that was how it was.

 

**the victim**

Amma had the flash-frozen glory of all little blonde girls struck by tragedy.  She knew fame would spend fast and cheaper than she’d like and then she’d be yesterday’s news or worse, a joke.  She needed to be thin and speak softly and always have her hair clean.  She practiced crying in a dignified kind of way, a single shiny track down one cheek.

When she cried for real, beating her feet and fists against her mattress, screaming into her pillow, sometimes tears didn’t even come out of her eyes, or if they did, they dried too quickly for her to tell—just evaporated off the skillet-hot burn of her flushed face.  The truth was never like the way you told it to other people.

Amma Crellin, thirteen years old, found out her beloved mother had been regularly poisoning her.  The scared, brave little girl spoke out to her school nurse—and solved her older sister’s murder.

Half-sister’s.

Good story.  Really good.

Amma Crellin, thirteen years old, found out that her beloved mother, who’d been poisoning her for years, poisoning her and loving her, had started giving some of her special pills and vitamin drinks to other little girls, younger girls.  The furious, jealous little girl didn’t give a shit about what might happen to her friends.  She’d been cheated on.  So she got herself all swimmy-headed with Mama’s medicine and went to that fat bitch of a school nurse and fucking beat it whimper by whimper into the woman’s thick skull until she took the hint.

The morning shows would spit her back out if she said any of that.  Too dark, too strange, too scary.  She needed to be good enough that it would matter if bad things happened to her; she needed to borrow saintly Marian’s insipid little smile in all those old photos.

If Alan was going to stop talking to her, if she was going to be shuttled off to live with a sister she’d never met, if Mama was never going to love her again—Amma wanted everything else she could get.  A book deal with some ghostwriter who’d hold her hand and lead her through her trauma.  News articles talking about how brave she was.  Marriage proposals in the mail from men who said they couldn’t wait for her to turn eighteen.

She would use it all to weigh her down so she wouldn’t float away.  She hadn’t been tethered to the world at all since she’d made Mama go away.  If she didn’t decide who she was going to be, every day she’d be less and less of anybody.

**the one who got away**

 

Amma sat on Camille’s ratty couch, pilling the fabric with her fingers and then plucking the little balls off.  Everything Camille owned was thrift store garbage.

Camille sounded like she was way down at the bottom of a well.  The light in her eyes was like that too—twin flashlights shining through a whole lot of dark.  Amma had never thought through this part.  Lily had been her swan song— _You’re just like Mama.  Look what you made me do.  You can’t love me right either, nobody loves me, nobody chooses me, not even my own mother, not even my own sister.  If you like her hair so much, then you can fucking have it._

But Camille, all pale and shocked so that her own hair looked almost flame-colored around her head, like she was one of the more deliciously gruesome martyrs on fire, was saying in an awful, uninflected voice:

“I called Wind Gap to ask about whether or not Adora was still there.  I didn’t tell them why I was asking, but Lily’s death is going to make the news, Amma, and they’ll put the pieces together.  The police will come here.  For you.”

Amma hooked one of the pills of upholstery under her thumbnail and looked at it there.

“Amma!”  Camille grabbed her arm hard, her fingers digging into Amma’s skin.  “You need to pay attention to me right now.  If you can kill someone—”  She swallowed.  Her eyes looked dead, made out of marble.  “If you can kill three people, Amma, you can fucking sit there and listen to me when I’m talking to you.  What do we need to get rid of?  What do we have to do?”

It was like she was on an elevator that had suddenly stopped, like the wrong parts of her were rising and falling in opposition to each other.  “What?”

“What.  Do we need.  To get rid of.”

She’d never thought Camille would ask her that.  She was so stupid right then, thoughts clicking together so embarrassingly slowly.  She took Camille to the dollhouse.

Piece by piece, they took apart the ivory floor, the sharp little shards of teeth that had rapped perfectly underneath her fingernails, making click-click-click sounds like Mama walking across the floor in her heels.  They outlawed ivory, that wasn’t her fault.  It had been so much work to pry the teeth from their jaws—the blood and her own sweat had made her hands slip around on the pliers.  Some of them had gotten crushed.  She’d fished out the little bitsy pieces.

_You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.  You’ve got teeth stuck in your teeth._

It had made her laugh the first time around.  This time she just felt a swelling blankness that she hated.  She had made this perfect and they were _ruining_ it.  She had thrown away all the fillings because they didn’t fit.  Everything had looked right.

They took away the little ivory tiles and the braided-hair rug from Camille’s room of the dollhouse.  Camille drove them to a McDonald’s all the way down in this Illinois town called Prairie du Rocher.  She bought them milkshakes, vanilla and strawberry, and when they were done, she put the teeth and hair in the bottoms of the cups and covered them up with damp napkins.  Then she took them out again, her hands shaking.

“DNA,” Camille said.  “From our saliva.  I need to think of something else.”  She threw Amma a look.  “Don’t even start to say you can help.  You’ve done enough.”

When they got back on the road, they were still headed east.  Half an hour on the highway and Camille pulled the car over and vomited her milkshake into the damp green grass and twigs and discarded soda cans beside the road.

Amma gave her a bottle of sun-warmed, chemical-tasting water she’d found in Camille’s cupholder.  Let her rinse her mouth out.

“Where are we going?” Amma said.  It was the first thing she’d said out loud since they’d left Camille’s apartment.

“I don’t know.”

“Are people going to come looking for us?”

“Yes,” Camille said.  She merged them back into traffic.  She was crying silently, her eyes red like a white rabbit’s.  Her lips were bitten to pieces.  She said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

 

**the stranger**

“I thought maybe you’d recognize me,” the woman on the other side of the steel table said.  Camille.  Her half-sister Camille.

“How am I supposed to recognize you?” Amma said.  “I’ve never even met you.  They didn’t have any pictures of you anywhere.”

She saw with dull gratification that this made the sister-girl flinch just a little under that putty-colored skin of hers—God, at least Amma had an excuse for looking dumpy and pale and ratty-haired.  She would hate to think that a person could move to a big city with no smell of hog’s blood in the air and come back to Wind Gap looking like she’d never left, like she’d gotten knocked up right out of high school and married some good old boy and resorted to dollar-store makeup.  At least Amma was in kiddie jail, where the standards were different.

It was true that Mama hadn’t kept any pictures of Camille, but it wasn’t true that Amma hadn’t known her right away.  She’d Googled her before, of course.

And the house had been floor-to-ceiling full of photos of Marian, and Camille looked like her.  Right here and now, she looked still and dead like her.  She might as well have been a zombie—all three of them could have been zombies together.

Amma wished she had Oxy, ecstasy, weed, beer, anything.  She couldn’t take four more years of this hellhole and its endless grinding time.

“What did you come here for, anyway?”

Camille straightened up in her chair.  “I’m a reporter now.”

“I know that.”

“So you do know some things about me, then.”

“I know lots of things about you,” Amma said.

But Camille didn’t ask her what.  “My boss, my editor, when he heard about your arrest, he sent me down to Wind Gap to talk to you.  A personal touch.”

“Goody for me.”

“Yeah, I’m not crazy about it either.  But here I am.  You might as well talk to me.”  Her eyes were grayer than Mama’s eyes, almost thundercloud-colored.  “Because I doubt Adora is schlepping her ass up here to meet with you.  Alan either.”  Whatever she saw in Amma’s face made her exhale sharply through her nose.  “See that?  We can both hurt each other just fine.  That’s how you know it’s family.”  She leaned back and gave Amma an ambiguous smile, almost nice.  “Or the South.”

Amma didn’t want to like her.  “It’s a conflict of interest for you to be interviewing me, isn’t it?  Don’t they kick people off newspapers for things like that?”

“It’s cute that you think ethics are why people are losing their jobs at newspapers.  Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest if I do it as a regular article.  He’ll probably print it as a column, or he won’t print it at all.  To tell you the truth, I think he just wanted me to come here to talk to you.  He’s a good guy, and it makes good people nervous when they find out you have a sister that you’ve never even met.” 

“A sister who’s a murderer,” Amma said.  “That probably makes the family reunion sell a lot more papers.”

It took thirty more minutes of that kind of thing—stonewalling, pushing back, being a total cunt.  In the end Camille left, her notebook blank and her eyes averted.

The funny thing was that Amma kept hoping, every visiting day after that, that Camille would come back.  Even years afterwards, when they finally let her go, it was Camille she tried—and failed—to find.  Camille must have changed her name.  Good for her.

 

**the lover**

 

That night when they were both high together was the first time, but it wasn’t the last.

She ground her cunt against Camille’s.  They had left all their clothes on—clothes gave you plausible deniability.  Amma liked that.  It felt like a logic problem in one of those PSAT prep tests they already had her taking— _you’re such a smart girl, Amma, you’d go far if you put your energy to better use_.  If you had two girls, and neither of them got undressed, and no one came, did that count as sex?  If a taboo fell in the forest and there was no one there to hear, were they still sisters?

Camille thought so.  Amma could tell.  Camille pushed up against Amma’s body just as much as Amma pushed down against hers, but she kept her eyes screwed shut the whole time.

It made Amma feel alone, balanced there above her, frustrated and wet and getting nothing done.  She grabbed Camille’s hand up off the bed and put Camille’s fingers in her mouth, sucking on them until it made a vicious, sloppy sound and the pressure bruised her lips.  Camille’s eyes flew open then.  It wasn’t even because Amma was hurting her—she could feel the delicate little joints of Camille’s fingers, sure, but she couldn’t feel bone moving against bone.

Well, yeah.  Of course.  Why would hurt be what woke Camille up, when hurt was what she was used to?  What Camille probably wasn’t used to was liking something.

Camille had had boyfriends—Amma had heard all about Camille’s boyfriends and she had seen the way men sniffed around her since she’d been home again—and she could have had girlfriends if she wanted them.  But she could only have the one living sister.  Anyone else she fucked wouldn’t be family and anyone else who could feel like family wouldn’t fuck her the way Amma would.  They wouldn’t make Camille happy like this, until her eyes looked like stars.

Amma said, “I love you,” her voice all mumbly and incoherent around Camille’s fingers, and Camille made a small, choked-off noise in the back of her throat.

“Bite them,” Camille said breathlessly.

It took her a moment to understand this instruction.

She bit down on Camille’s fingers, worried her teeth into them.  She wanted Camille to carry a ring of scar tissue around one finger.  For the rest of their lives, she wanted both of them to remember this.  This was the night they became one inseparable thing.


End file.
